Eventbrite Wants to Kill Square, Too

The space is getting saturated

The hot online ticketing company Eventbrite has launched a credit card reader for Apple’s (NASDAQ:AAPL) iPad and iPhone. The application allows entertainment venues to easily take payments, and Eventbrite CEO Kevin Hartz calls it a “mobile box office.”

But there’s a problem: The space is getting saturated. Just last week, eBay (NASDAQ:EBAY) announced its own card reader, and the space includes other larger rivals such as Intuit (NASDAQ:INTU) and VeriFone (NYSE:PAY).

All of this is bad news for the innovator in the market, Square. The mastermind of the company is Jack Dorsey, who is the co-founder of Twitter. Last summer, he raised a cool $100 million for the company and even got Richard Branson as an investor.

But with the onslaught of competition, Square’s $1 billion valuation looks a bit dicey — and so do the prospects for an IPO.

Based in Silicon Valley, Tom Taulli is in the heart of IPO land. On a regular basis, he talks with many of the top tech CEOs and founders trying to find the next hot deals and finding out which start-ups are stinkers.

A long-time follower of the IPO scene, back in 1999 Tom started one of the first sites in the space called WebIPO. It was a place where investors got research as well as access to deals for the dot-com boom. Tom also wrote the top-selling book, Investing in IPOs. In it, he covers all the aspects of analyzing an IPO, such as reading the prospectus, detecting the risk factors and understanding some of the arcane regulations. But don’t worry — if that process is too intimidating for you, thankfully Tom will do the legwork for you right here in the IPO Playbook blog.

Tom is routinely quoted in the media about upcoming deals with his interviews on CNBC and Bloomberg TV, but he is eager to take your questions too. You can message him on Twitter at @ttaulli. And feel free to weigh in via the comments section on any of his IPO Playbook posts.